The assignment of access points (APs) to controllers in a controller cluster could be done in a variety of ways. For example, the APs can be assigned to the controllers based on AP groups to provide for geo-affinity. Thus, geographically co-located APs will be assigned to the same controller. As another example, APs can be assigned to controllers according to a “salt-and-pepper” deployment to provide for failover coverage. In the “salt-and-pepper” deployment, the APs within the same geographic area are interspersed across multiple controllers. Thus, failure of a single controller which affects all of the APs managed by the single controller will not cause loss of coverage area because the APs adjacent to those failed APs are still served by other controllers within the same geographic area. However, such AP assignments conventionally must be done manually by a network administrator and they have to be re-done when new APs has been added or existing APs have been decommission. Moreover, the “salt-and-pepper” deployment must have different controllers managing adjacent APs in a cohesive manner. Otherwise, a client device roaming from a first AP managed by a first controller to a second AP managed by a second controller may lose connectivity to the network. In addition, the “salt-and-pepper” deployment scheme could potentially cause disruptions in uniform communication applications (such as Lync®), fast roaming compliant to IEEE 802.11r standard, proprietary algorithms that match client devices to the best AP in its RF neighborhood (such as ClientMatch™), etc., which requires multiple controllers managing adjacent APs to work together seamlessly.